Liferea developers have announced the availability of the first stable version of the 1.6.x series. Liferea (Linux Feed Reader) is an aggregator for online news feeds. There are many other news readers available, but these others are not available for Linux or require many extra libraries to be installed.

Feed readers are quickly becoming very important applications in people’s daily workflows. Along with your email client and web browser, your feed reader is a hub of information.

Feed readers, news readers and e-mail clients all represent a hazy gray area for me, since many of them do two or even three of those things at the same time. So for fun, I have a lump of applications here that might do one of those things, two of them, or maybe all at once.

I get a lot of my news via rss feeds. For that purpose, I really like Liferea. Liferea is a consistently good feed reader and aggregator for Linux. I have used it since the 1.0 series and have always been pleased.

Here are 5 of the most popular, standalone feed reader applications for Linux. I didn't include feed readers which come with applications like Firefox, Opera or Thunderbird for example, but these can also be considered a viable alternative to the ones below.

The fourth alpha of Ubuntu 9.10 was released a few days ago and since I covered it earlier in this article, here I'll briefly overview Kubuntu, the KDE-based distribution of Ubuntu. All the screenshots were taken after a complete dist-upgrade, so the software should be completely up-to-date as of today.

Applications that collect data from RSS-compliant sites are called RSS readers or “aggregators.” RSSOwl is such an application. RSSOwl lets you gather, organize, update, and store information from any compliant source in a convenient, easy to use interface, save selected information in various formats for offline viewing and sharing, and much more.

The much-awaited Ubuntu 9.10 was released as scheduled last week. For the benefit of those readers who are new to the Linux world and who might be overwhelmed by the sheer number of available options, here is a brief recap of the official release line-up."

Written in Java, RSSOwl is a powerful feed reader for Linux, with support for RSS, RDF and Atom feeds, with a lot of features and customisation options.